A natural gas well being drilled by Cheseapeake Energy in rural Pennsylvania suffered a blowout on Tuesday night, leading to a spill of water containing hydraulic fracturing fluids, according to several reports.
The Associated Press reports that emergency officials in Bradford County in northeast Pennsylvania said thousands of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals spilled from the well site beginning Tuesday night, after a piece of well casing near the surface failed.
Francis Roupp, deputy director of the county emergency management agency, said the frac fluids reached a small stream but “no adverse effects” were reported.
There were no injuries, explosion or fire.
Neighbors near the site don’t seem too worried, according to this local television report:
But groups opposed to hydraulic fracturing were quick to point out the timing of the accident — the same week as the one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill:
“Today’s accident with the natural gas well in Pennsylvania shows how dangerous hyrdrofacking is and the disastrous impacts for local communities,” said Jim Dean, chair of Democracy for America. “It’s time to Congress to pass the FRAC act and keep people safe. There’s a reason why people don’t live on top of oil wells, and it’s the same for natural gas.”
Why does CHK cause so many earthquakes and have so many incidents like this?
What other incidents has CHK created ?
And btw, the quakes in Arkansas are continuing.
And EM since you work in the industry, you know all too well at the difficulty of finding experienced people. The booms and busts of the past 50 years has created long gaps of time when few entered the industry, between short periods of extreme demand for trained personnel.
When I was in the industry in the late 70′s, we joked about ” yesterday I did not know what one was, and today, I are one ” .
I had two cousins who started in OU’s PE school during the boom, and graduated after it went bust in 1981. Neither worked a day as a PE.
And that is something the entire industry has to work with, not just CHK.
CHK is hiring young military officers who have fulfilled their obligation after graduating from the academies. And then putting them into their own petro engineer training program.
Good people are hard to find.
And how much harder does it become, to recruit people to the industry when the President says ” oil is yesterday’s energy ” in his State of the Union address ?
If you were a soph in college right now, would you major in geology or PE ? I would not.
I would guess the ages of oil industry employees at the present time, would be a good number of people over 50 and a large number under 30, with very few between.
This is not just applicable to CHK.
And also, I notice nothing is said in this story, about injuries to the workers.
Blowouts occur in oil/gas drilling. In Texas or Oklahoma, they would make the news, but the main concern would be if anyone was injured.
Back east, its just an event that can be used for political spin. They don’t care about people.
Dollar:
The blog post has this: “There were no injuries, explosion or fire.”
If there was an injury it would likely be in the first sentence of the TV news report. Even more than newspapers, TV news loves to put the possible injuries/deaths up top.
OK, I see that now, I missed it before, even after going back and looking for it a second time ……….. I guess my age is catching up with me.
Dollar:
It’s easy to miss stuff sometimes if the paragraph runs too long. When we first started to publish more of our content online years ago the assumption was “you can write longer because there’s no limit to the space.” But online the human eye works much the same way as in paper and tunes out big blocks of text. We need to constantly balance both content and appearance online.
Maybe Mr. Dollar missed the part about no injuries, but he sure nailed it on the political spin part. Notice that this is “a disastrous impact”. Dont get me wrong, this is no good, but I don’t think it quite ranks as a “disastrous impact”.
Dollar:
As usual making a lot of cents…
Your points about the earthquakes I have addressed earlier…
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/03/04/drillers-will-stop-injections-for-fear-of-earthquakes-in-arkansas/
While I agree with you about Obama not exactly being a motivating factor I think the general lax attitude of the industry in general toward technology with the MBA culture is also a very serious problem. I did post something the head of Shell US said last week on a later entry on this latest incident, and these tragic and unnecessary accidents must stop.
bradley: tragic? Yes, I use that word since as somebody who has worked in the natural gas industry for years and as Tom Fowler can verify have a very ecofriendly house natural gas is CLEAN and can be a SOLUTION.
Pacala and Socolow at Princeton have their 8 wedges to abate CO2 on a cost neutral basis for this country (the dems want to make us broke, I agree; cost neutral abatement is possible). If one knows the details of the plan one KNOWS that CCS is overstated for the very same reason as, well, the DFW earthquakes which have settled down. Imagine injecting a whole lot of CO2 rather than a little bit of waste water and I am oversimplifying things but you get the picture.
This shale gas is the replacement wedge for CCS.
It’s a wedge CO2 abatement folks. A wedge. A bridge fuel wedge